Chaste Widows, Cunning Wives, and Amazonian Warriors

Vijaya R amaswamy
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Chaste Widows, Cunning
Wives, and Amazonian Warriors

Imaging of Women in Tamil Oral Traditions

This article is an attempt to cut through the monolithic imaging of women in
traditional Tamil societies. In the process, the study critically explores a whole
trope of representations of women ranging from chaste wives to deviant and/
or cunning women. In studying the Alli or Pavaḻakkoḍi myths, this article also
attempts to analyze the morphology of patriarchal taming, both of the myth
and its female protagonist. In moving from oral recitations to chapbooks, the
article also looks at the complexities of the slippages between orality and tex-
tuality as well as between the written text and its dramatized performances.
keywords: Tamil—widows—wives—warriors—ballads—performances

Asian Ethnology Volume 69, Number 1 • 2010, 129–157
© Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture

This article will look at some of the broad paradigms within which women-
oriented Tamil myths and legends operate. Besides presenting contrasting
images which cut through the frozen iconization of women encountered in clas-
sical or so-called “high tradition” texts, I shall also specifically focus on the trans-
formational qualities of folk legends as they move between texts and contexts. The
myths in the process of their transmissions and transmutations do not follow a
linear course but tend to zigzag between various representational modes.

Methodological approach and sources

This study uses women-oriented tales, both in print as narrations and
within performance traditions, in an attempt to deconstruct monolithic represen-
tations of women in conventional Tamil society. Multiple texts of these ballads
exist, ranging from tales such as Alli Katai (katai in Tamil means “story”), to bal-
lads such as Alli Arasāṇi Kōvai, to performance texts like Alli Nāṭakam (natakam
in Tamil means play or drama).1 With the coming of cinema to the Tamil areas
in the 1930s, the cinematic scripts become one more mode of narration of these
legends or ballads. This article is based not only on an analytical study of these
multiple texts but also on oral narrations heard from my grandmothers and other
elderly women in Tamil families. My research also derives from my critical appre-
ciation of the Tamil cinematic versions of these ballads.

One of my methodological concerns is to track the fluidity of oral traditions in
moving between the written and the oral, changing every time in tone, empha-
sis, and even in the narrative content and folk performances. As Blackburn and
R amanujan (1986, 11) point out in their pathbreaking volume, “the dual nature
of folklore that has long fascinated scholars: it is ‘traditional,’ yet it lives through
variation. The fixity of form confers authority and familiarity, while variation allows
changes in content.”

The article is also concerned with the intertwining of classical-textual and
“folk”-oral traditions, rendering these categories “fuzzy.” It is equally engaged
with the mutations of some of these women-oriented myths through historical
time and space, in the course of which both the myth and its female protagonists
go through a metamorphosis. One cannot rule out the possibility of some of these

130 | Asian Ethnology Volume 69, Number 1 • 2010

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 131

having been matrilocal myths which gradually got subsumed in the patriarchal reg-
ister. Unfortunately, however, there are no extant versions of the core story of
myths and what remains for the researcher to look at are only the myths as they
appear after the process of patriarchal socialization. Women’s agency in such bal-
lads survives as a sub-text in some versions of the published ballads, as well as
within performance traditions.

In the process of their engagement with folklore either by or about women,
feminists have found themselves locked in the horns of an intellectual dilemma,
being at one and the same time both subject and object of research. In an emic
research of this kind it is tempting for the feminist scholar to position herself in
such a fashion that the folkloristic representations depict women in a positive or
even combative light, constantly challenging male patriarchal society. The research
is confronted by the academic dilemma of balancing between natural empathies
and intellectual impartiality. Many of the broader feminist theoretical reflections
find an echo in this present study on the representations of women in Tamil folk-
lore. The thread of feminist subjectivity is as strongly present in the present discur-
sive analysis as in other studies where women have undertaken a similar exercise.

The printed sources for this article are largely drawn from the genre charac-
terized as “printed folklore.” Many of these publications were purchased after a
long and arduous search for over a decade, in the by-lanes of the colonial city of
Chennai and elsewhere in Tamil Nadu. Much of this popular literature, although
not all of it, consists of Periya Eḻuttu publications. Periya Eḻuttu literally means
“Big Letters.” These small books with large print were printed on thin paper at
cheap printing presses from the 1880s. There were Periya Eḻuttu and other pub-
lishers producing and circulating similar literature through the Gujili2 (also known
as Moor Market or China Bazar) market in Chennai, located near the central rail-
way station.3 Kalaratnagaram Press of U. Pushparatha Cheṭṭiar and later several
other publishers were maybe involved in the production of these popular Gujili
books. The heyday of Periya Eḻuttu publications began from the turn of the last
century.4 At some point in the course of the mid-twentieth century, Periya Eḻuttu
seems to have become a generic term for any “Large Print” publication. Most of
the women-centered folk stories which find their way into popular chapbooks were
a part of either kataipāḍal (song stories), villupāṭṭu (bow-songs), performance
traditions, or religious/ritual traditions. Interestingly, one may not usually expect
to find the tales of women like Alli or Āravalli-Sūravalli nor of tragic-heroic fig-
ures like Kaṇṇagi and Nallataṅgāḷ in the folksong genre specifically identified with
women, such as oppāri (lamentation songs) or tālāṭṭu (lullabies). The plausible
reason could be their deviant or tragic personalities. Nevertheless, these ballads or
tales are an important component of popular literature. The Periya Eḻuttu publica-
tions, one of the main sources of this present study, are a part of this Gujili market
which targeted a neo-literate audience, avid for tales of murder and all forms of
deviance including myths and black magic. Writing in the 1990s, Azhagiyanayaki
Ammal writes in her autobiography that every Friday the Gujili merchants would
travel to the local market carrying low-priced popular books, including Periya Eḻuttu

132 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

publications, in a bundle. The hawker would spread his wares on their front patio
and her mother would buy Alli Arasāṇi Mālai, Nallataṅgāḷ, and Pavaḻakkoḍi for
her at very cheap rates varying from four chakrams to seven Travancore chakrams5
(Venkatachalapathy 2004, 64).

In sourcing Tamil folktales, I have critically watched the cinematic representa-
tions of balladic characters like “Alli,” “Āravalli,” and so on. At the same time, the
research for this article is also drawn from the narrations of these tales by Tamil
matriarchs like my own grandmother. A. K. Ramanujan, in many of his essays,
makes the interesting point about the connection between women as the bearers
of tales and women’s agency in shaping these tales in the course of their narrations
(see Ramanujan in Dharwadker 1999, 429–47).

It is important to make the point here that the representational categories used
in this article are my own. They are intended to serve the purpose of enabling
feminist scholars to use their “double gaze” to critically view these categories
within which Tamil women have been imagined. Secondly, I have treated my
shifts between these “typecastings” somewhat in the manner of cinematic “cuts,”
without seeking to enforce any artificial connectivity between these groupings.

Situating the theme: texts and contexts

The Tamil myths analyzed here, in the process of their transmissions and
transmutations, do not follow a linear course but tend to zigzag between the imag-
ing of women within the indigenous Tamil tradition, which predates Brahmani-
cal culture, and their absorption into the Brahmanic-patriarchal stereotyping of
women as “silent, chaste, and self-sacrificing.” Section one deals with the two tragic
widows, Kaṇṇagi and Nallataṅgāḷ; section two deals with negative representations
and is titled “Cunning Wives and Sorceress Queens: Ballads of Neeli and Āravalli-
Sūravalli”; and section three deals with the notion of patriarchal taming, and is
titled “Alli and Pavaḻakkoḍi: From Amazonian Rulers to Submissive Wives.”

It is noteworthy that among the earliest scholars to study Tamil ballads were N.
Vanamamalai (1969, 1981), S. D. Lourdu (1988, 2000), and M. Arunacha-
lam (1976). I have applied some of their insights to attempt a gendered reading
of Tamil ballads. In recent years, N. R amachandran (2002) has looked at the
social tensions that underpin many of these ballads. His book Tuḍiyāna Sāmigaḷ
(Tamil), analyses the ways in which social tangles and tensions have been handled
in villupāṭṭu performances. In the villupāṭṭu performance, a huge bow is twanged
to the accompaniment of the singing of the ballads. The performers also use the
uḍukku, a percussion instrument, for dramatic effect. These folk representations
have passed on from the narrative forms to the field of performing arts. These bal-
lads and legends have been represented in folk performances probably since the
sixteenth century when villupāṭṭu first came to represent a popular form of the
performing arts (Gomatinayakam 1979). The villupāṭṭu gradually flowed into
theater performances and eventually moved into the cinematic mode.6 Much of

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 133

Stuart Blackburn’s folkloristic research was centered on the villupāṭṭu traditions
in Nānjil Nāḍu (modern Kanyakumari district).7 Teru kūtu literally means “street
performance” and represents the prototype of street plays. The texts for the vari-
ous modes of performance differed in keeping with contextual changes and have
today become a part of the store of printed material available in old bookshops in
Moor Market and Parry’s Corner, a famous colonial street in Chennai. Here I shall
look both at the texts and the performance contexts of such ballads although there
is comparatively little tangible source material on the latter aspect with the excep-
tion of the cinematic mode.8

Two chaste wives/widows: kaṆṆagi and nallataṄgāL

It is important to foreground the imaging of the chaste wife in Tamil
oral tradition with a discussion of the notion of kaṟpu, which for want of a better
term can be translated as “chastity.” Kaṟpu is an important cultural signifier for the
Tamils. The Sangam (chronologically placed between the third century BCE and
the third century CE) text Tolkāppiyam, (a grammatical work with sections dat-
ing from the fifth century BCE to the third century CE) has an entire section titled
kaṟpiyal, meaning “The grammar of chastity.”9 In a significant article, George Hart
has pointed out that the notion of kaṟpu or chastity, which is considered primary
to Brahminical-patriarchy, is actually very much a Dravidian concept (Hart 1999,
233–35). The term Dravidian is derived from “Drāviḍa,” which refers to the origi-
nal inhabitants of Peninsular India. Dravidian covers a wide trope of cultural refer-
ences within the societies and peoples of South India.

The term kaṟpu does not just connote chastity but is, in fact, a broader term
which takes into its sweep virtually all the qualities “good” women are supposed
to possess, aside from the imperative virtue of chastity such as “service” (to one’s
husband), and the spirit of loyalty and self-sacrifice and modesty in bearing. Hart
makes the interesting observation that the kaṟpu of the wife “consisted of a sort of
asceticism, the restraining of all impulses that were in any way immodest. Clearly,
the more sexually attractive a woman is, the more power her chastity endows her
with” (Hart 1975, 97). The stereotyping of women in Tamil society has largely
revolved around this notion of kaṟpu. From her innate kaṟpu comes the sacred
power of the woman, whether she is an unmarried girl or a married woman. The
power of kaṟpu was to be both feared and revered because it could be both boon-
giving as well as extremely destructive if threatened. Kaṟpu in the Puranānūru is
equated with “godliness”—kadavuḻ chānṟa kaṟpu,10 literally “divinity like chastity.”
In a Ahanānūru poem (Ahanānūru, 184; see Hart 1975, 96), kaṟpu is treated as
being synonymous with divinity—kaḍavuḷ kaṟpu. The virtue of kaṟpu imbued the
wife with immense spiritual powers and transformed her into pattini-daivam, lit-
erally “Wife-Goddess.” The same notion of kaṟpu is also found in the didactic
Jain text Tirukkuṟaḷ which belongs to the late Sangam era.11 Clearly, the operative
force behind the worship of the pattini-daivam is the fear of her power of chastity.

134 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

Chastity as power is a recurrent theme that runs through not only the Sangam
text but even the medieval devotional movements.

The fearful aspect of kaṟpu connects it with another recurrent term in early
Tamil literature, namely, aṇanku. A poem from the Ahanānūru uses the inter-
esting expression aṇanku ūru kaṟpu (Ahanānūru: 73; see Hart 1975, 96). The
coupling of the term aṇanku with chastity or kaṟpu lends a more nuanced under-
standing of chastity by connecting it with the nature of female sexuality. In Dravid-
ian cultures, the spiritual power of women was linked to both the fear of pollution
(through menstrual blood, and so on) and the male fear of female sexuality. It is
likely that the ancient Tamils defined female sexual power as aṇanku, a force to be
simultaneously feared and worshipped. The woman’s aṇanku, if contained within
the paradigm of the chaste wife, could be auspicious, making her a sumangali,
literally “the auspicious one.” Outside the marital framework, whether she is a
virgin or a widow, the aṇanku of the woman was a deadly and destructive power.
The complete identification of aṇanku with female sexuality is a debatable point.
However, in the present context, Hart’s definition would hold true since the great
Tamil late-Sangam epic Śilappadikāram does associate aṇanku with female power
and personifies it into “Aṇanku,” the youngest of the seven virgin sisters “who
made Siva dance.”12

The entire discussion on the twin notions of kaṟpu (chastity) and aṇanku,
which broadly covers notions of female sexuality becomes relevant because the
two concepts get connected to Kaṇṇagi, the heroine of the Śilappadikāram.
Kaṇṇagi, who is hailed in texts as Kaṟpukkarasi, literally “the queen of chastity,”
would be the outstanding example from the Tamil epic tradition of the power of
chastity and female spirituality. Kaṇṇagi’s entry into the court of the Pandyan king
of Madurai from Iḷango Aḍigaḻ’s text is worth quoting here because the herald’s
description of Kaṇṇagi is both dramatic and awe-inspiring:

Someone waits at the gate. She is not the deity Koṟṟavai, the goddess of vic-
tory, holding in her hand the victorious spear, and standing upon the nape of
the buffalo with an unceasing gush of blood from its fresh wound. Nor is she
Aṇanku, youngest sister of the seven virgins who made Siva dance; nor even is
she the Kāḻi of the forest, which is the residence of ghosts and goblins; nor again
is she the goddess that tore up the mighty chest of Dharuka. She appears to be
filled with resentment. She seems to swell with rage. She has lost her husband;
she has in her hand an anklet of gold, and she waits at the gate.13

The legend of Kaṇṇagi is recorded in the late-Sangam epic Śilappadikāram.14 The
epic written by Iḷango Aḍigaḻ can be dated to around the fourth century CE. The
main characters are Kōvalan, the son of Mācattuvan (the name means “a great car-
avan trader”), Kaṇṇagi, the daughter of Mānāyakan (which means “a renowned
seafaring merchant), and Mādhavi, the courtesan who forms the third end of
the romantic triangle. The core of the epic is the attempted sale of Kaṇṇagi’s
anklet by Kōvalan in the bazaar of Madurai to a craftsman who happens to be
the king’s goldsmith. The king’s goldsmith, who has stolen the queen’s anklet,

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 135

falsely implicates Kōvalan as the thief who is then summarily executed. The kaṟpu
of Kaṇṇagi blazes forth as she confronts the kings with the truth. The fire of her
chastity burns up the city of Madurai. While the power and fury of Kaṇṇagi’s kaṟpu
leaves the city of Madurai burning, she herself retires to Murugavēl Koṭṭam in
Malainaḍu (Koḍungallūr or Cranganore), eventually bodily ascending to heaven.

Across the sea in Sri Lanka, the legend of Kaṇṇagi took a curious twist. It is said
that after attending the consecration ceremony of the mā-daivam (great goddess)
or pattini-daivam, (wife-goddess), Gajabahu carried with him a consecrated image
of Kaṇṇagi. However, when Kaṇṇagi reached Yāḷpāṇam (Jaffna) her sacral power
was seen as vicious and fearful. This fear is reflected in her worship in Yāḷpāṇam as
a five-headed snake.15 In this folk version, Kaṇṇagi, by the power of her chastity,
brought the slain Kōvalan back to life. On regaining consciousness, he uttered the
word “Mādhavi,” the courtesan’s name. In great anger and disgust Kaṇṇagi turned
into a five-headed cobra and it is in this vengeful form that the diasporic Tamils
of Sri Lanka worship her. Deified in Tamil society as a goddess, Kaṇṇagi also has
many temples dedicated to her in Sri Lanka. The Nagabhushaṇi (snake temples)
in Sri Lanka in and around Yāḷpāṇam such as the ones at Alavetti, Suruvil, and
Seerani, are all temples dedicated to Kaṇṇagi.

In the texts operating between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, which lies across
the Gulf of Mannar, the representation of Kaṇṇagi changes from a wife seething
with righteous anger to that of a vengeful wife, a veritable cobra. Kaṇṇagi and the
burning of the city of Madurai have found many theatrical and cinematic represen-
tations. One of the best known is R. S. Mani’s Kaṇṇagi, produced in 1942 with
Kaṇṇamba in the lead role. One of the most popular scenes within the perfor-
mance tradition is that of Kaṇṇagi flinging her breast onto the street of Madurai,
causing the entire city to burn:

Men and women of Madurai, city of four temples,
Gods of the skies and men of austerities,
Hear me.
I am enraged at this city
whose king wrought injustice upon him I love,
and I am without fault.
With her hand she twisted off her left breast,
encircled Madurai three times keeping it to the right,
uttered a curse,
and shining with her ornaments
threw her lovely breast on the pollen-covered street.16

There is yet another dimension to the multiple representations of Kaṇṇagi—her
historicization. Kaṇṇagi seems to exist on the threshold of historical and epic tra-
ditions. Paranar, a Sangam poet, specifically refers to Kaṇṇagi and the consecration
of a memorial stone to her by the King Cēran Cenguṭṭavan.17 The reference in the
Sangam text Naṟṟinai to Tirumāmaṇi, who cast off one of her breasts in fury, is
also believed to refer to Kaṇṇagi. The Puranānūru evidence also states that the

136 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

stone was ceremoniously washed in the Ganges water before being installed in the
area of the Chera kings (Kerala). The site of this temple, called Pattini Kōṭṭam,
is at Koḍungallūr (British Cranganore) in Kerala, around two hundred and ten
kilometers from Madurai. This temple is known today as the Mangaḷadēvi temple.
Possession of the temple is hotly contested between the two states.18 According
to the Buddhist text Mahāvamsa, the consecration of this one-breasted pattini-
daivam is said to have been attended by Gajabahu, the king of Sri Lanka. V. R.
Ramachandra Dikshitar (Śilappadikāram, 1939, 73) gives the approximate date as
around 172 or 173 CE. The celebration of Kaṇṇagi’s kaṟpu persists even today in
the Pattini Kōttam at Kodungallūr where a major festival (consisting of dances
and dramatic performances) is held in honour of Kaṇṇagi in the Tamil month of
Paṅguni, which falls between 15 March to 15 April.

NallataṄgāL, the good younger sister

The story of Nallataṅgāḷ captures the tragic imagination of the Tamils
and is an evergreen favorite within performance traditions, including the silver
screen. Nallataṅgāḷ was a widow with many children who was left destitute by
her husband. Ill-treated at her in-laws place and at her brother’s place during his
absence by her sister-in-law, Nallataṅgāḷ decides to kill herself and her helpless
children. She pushes them into a well and jumps into it herself. In another ver-
sion, Nallataṅgāḷ’s husband went off to distant lands to make a living. His wife
was therefore left at the tender mercies of her cruel in-laws and driven to suicide.
Irrespective of her location in patriarchal society, either as an abandoned wife or as
a widow, her tragic end remains the same. In some later versions, Nallataṅgāḷ and
her dead children are restored to life by her brother who had committed suicide
in remorse and become a “benevolent” ghost. The resurrection of Nallataṅgāḷ in
some of the popular versions may owe its story twist to the middle class penchant
for “happy endings.”

In the Periya Eḻuttu edition of Pugaḻendi Pulavar’s Nallataṅgāḷ ballad, her
father is Rāmalinga Mahārāja, a petty chieftain of Madurai. The parents die, leav-
ing their daughter Nallataṅgāḷ in the care of her brother Nallatambi who is mar-
ried to the evil Moolialangāri. Nallataṅgāḷ marries a prince of Kashi. The reference
to Kashi in this context must be to some petty principality near Madurai since
Kashi or the holy city of Varanasi is located in Northern India, miles away from
Nallataṅgāḷ’s birth place. Nallataṅgāḷ gives birth to seven children. The ballad now
takes a dramatic turn with the description of a severe famine which devastated the
kingdom. In the face of impending starvation, Nallataṅgāḷ decides to seek refuge
with Nallatambi. The conclusion takes the familiar trajectory with the ill-treat-
ment of Nallataṅgāḷ and her children by her sister-in-law. The hapless woman falls
into a well with all her children. Her husband and her brother, who are looking
for Nallataṅgāḷ, both commit suicide out of guilt and remorse. This version ends
on a miraculous note with the divine couple Śiva and Pārvati intervening in the

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 137

tangled lives of these human beings and bringing the dead back to life. The com-
ing back to life of Nallataṅgāḷ is not, however, the most abiding image of her in
folk memory. Her presence in the Tamil folk landscape is that of the tragic widow
who is driven by a cruel patriarchal society into killing herself and her innocent
children.

The myth of Nallataṅgāḷ has been made popular on stage and screen through
innumerable theatrical and cinematic versions of her story. In 1935 two versions of
Nallataṅgāḷ came out simultaneously, produced by Angel Films and Pioneer Films
respectively.19 The patriarchal subsuming of Nallataṅgāḷ, which iconizes her as a
suffering widow without imbuing her with any spirit, takes us back to the paradig-
matic dilemma that while some women’s folklore are about women they do not fall
within the domain of women’s active agency. Rather, the narration is indicative of
male appropriation of woman’s (in this case a widow’s) misery as aesthetic expres-
sion. On the other hand, it is possible to argue that Nallataṅgāḷ seems to move
within the structure of patriarchy but at the same time indicts it in unqualified
terms. The validity of either reading may largely depend on the emotive power
of the woman acting the part of Nallataṅgāḷ on stage or cinema. The legend of
Nallataṅgāḷ was woven into the lives of modern day Tamils by the anthropologist
Margaret Trawick in her book (1990) based on her fieldwork undertaken in the
1990s. In her chapter titled “Desire in Kinship” she looks at social tensions within
Tamil kinship, especially the deep seated antagonism between wife and sister-in-
law, between wife and mother-in-law, and the brother-sister bonding which places
the wife at the periphery (Trawick 1990, chapter IV).

Cunning wives and sorceress queens:
ballads of neeli and ārvalli-sūravalli

The second section will deal with two balladic traditions which have two
anti-heroines center stage—Paḻayanūr Neeli and the murderous queens Āravalli
and Sūravalli. While the negative representation of the latter two follows a linear
pattern, the legend of Neeli tends to zigzag between two bipolarities. She is some-
times the dreaded Neeli pēy (the term pēy can be broadly translated as “demon-
ess”), sometimes the feared and worshipped goddess Isakki Amman, and yet again
the revered Kāraikkāl Pēyar20 of the Periyapurāṇam, a twelfth-century Saivite
hagiographical text. The versatile Neeli thus goes through a range of imaging from
a prostitute to a proselytising Jaina nun to the saintly Shaivite Nayanar “Pēyar.”

Split Images of Neeli: Demoness or Goddess?

The story of Neeli occupies a whole trope of literary genre ranging from
ballads and tales to the dramatic poetic forms known as villupāṭṭu and the folk
theater, especially yakshagāna in Karnataka. The tale or myth is as widely varied in
historical time and space, changing its character as it moves from Tamil Nadu into
Karnataka.

138 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

The theme of Neelakēsi is the folk story of the Paḻayanūr Neeli. The folktale/
ballad of Neelakēsi, which is popular to this day, is encountered for the first time
with some crucial variations in the story of Neelakēsi narrated by the saint Chekkiḻar
in his celebrated hagiographical text Periyapurāṇam, which is a narration of the
lives of saints. This text is placed sometime in the twelfth century. In this version
Neeli was the chaste wife of a Brahmin of Paḻayanūr (the place is identified by
this author with Tiruvālangāḍu) who fell into the trap of a prostitute and killed
his pregnant wife, robbing her of all her jewelry.21 In the next birth the Brahmin,
now in his incarnation as a merchant (that is, a cheṭṭi who is a non-Brahmin), came
to Paḻayanūr in search of trade prospects. Neeli, who had turned into a vengeful
ghost (pēy), pursued him with a ghostly child that she had materialized. Claiming
to be his wife, she appealed to the Veḷḷāḷar (the agricultural community typifying
wealthy landlords) to restore her conjugal rights.

It is said that the deceitful Neeli shed copious tears to hoodwink the village
elders. Even today in Tamil culture any woman shedding hypocritical tears is
said to shed neeli kaṇṇeer, meaning “false tears.” This shows the extent to which
mythical imaging in its turn gets reflected in common parlance and popular cul-
ture. Despite the protests of the Brahmin that he did not know her, the Veḷḷāḷar
believed her story and forced them to stay together. In the night Neeli murdered
him most cruelly, thereby avenging her own murder. It is said that the seventy
Veḷḷāḷar elders of the village who had passed the judgment committed mass suicide
in remorse. Evidence of memorial stones to the Veḷḷāḷar from the Tiruvālangāḍu
site seems to confirm some of these events. If one were to alight at Arakkōṇam
junction and travel about fifteen kilometers towards Tiruvaḷḷur, one would come
across a place known as Tī Pāynta Kunṭam at Paḻayanūr. In a dilapidated stone
structure here one finds the statues of the seventy Veḷḷāḷar who immolated them-
selves. There is also said to be a memorial stone to Neeli at the same site.22

After murdering her husband, Paḻayanūr Neeli continued to live in
Tiruvālangāḍu. The Tiruvālangāḍu Sthala Mahātmyam gets linked with the Neeli
legend at this point. Neeli had become the dreaded Kāḷi of Tiruvālangāḍu, reign-
ing on the border between Paḻayanūr and Tiruvālangāḍu. As the Ellai Dēvatai 23
of the area (the unknown author of the Sthala Mahātmyam states that this Kāli
was none other than Neeli), she, along with a fearsome army, spread devastation
all around her. Even the gods found her antics intolerable and appealed to Lord
Vishnu (the force signifying protection among the trinity) for help. Vishnu told
them the Kāḷi had the support of Śiva’s consort Pārvati and hence they must appeal
to him. Instead of waging an open war against the destructive Kāḷi, Śiva decided
to challenge her to a dancing contest. Following the famous mythology of the
Śiva Śhakti dance which is narrated in other Śaivite sacred sites like Chidambaram,
Kāḷi matched him step for step till he took recourse to the Chanḍa stance in which
the legs had to be lifted up. As a woman, Kāḷi would not do this out of modesty
and therefore lost the contest. Thus at Tiruvālangāḍu the dancing Natarāja reigns
supreme while Kāḷi abides at the borders as a subordinate Ellai Dēvatai.

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 139

In yet another feat of metamorphosis, the Karaikkāl Pēyar, the highly revered
seventh-century Nayanar saint of Tiruvālangāḍu, blends into the Neeli legend.
According to Chekkiḻar,24 Punitavati is a beautiful woman who is deserted by
her husband and as a consequence severs her links with the world and becomes
a skeletal being, a pēy. She assumes the eternal role of witness of Śiva’s dance at
Tiruvālangā ḍu. The opening stanza of Karaikkal Ammiyar’s own composi-
tion Tiruvālangāttu Moota Tiruppadigam is very revealing in the context of the
Paḻayanūr/Tiruvālangāḍu Neeli pēy. I quote:

She has shriveled breasts
and bulging veins
In place of white teeth
empty cavities gape
with ruddy hair, hollow belly
a pair of fangs, knobby ankles and long shins
the demon woman (pēy) wails
at the desolate cremation ground
where our Lord
... dances among the flames
His home is Ālangāḍu.25

Śiva’s abode is at Tiruvālangāḍu close to Paḻayanūr where the wicked Neeli fooled
the people with her tricks and her tears. Alternately moving from chaste wife to
temptress/murderess, Neeli at one point is imaged as goddess Pārvati herself. The
consort of Śiva in the temple of Tiruvālangāḍu is called Vanḍaiyar kuḻali, which
seems to be the exact Tamil equivalent of the Sanskritic name Neelakēsi. Perhaps
Neeli, who had troubled the people of Tiruvālangāḍu and been subsequently sub-
dued by Śiva, had eventually found a place by his side as Vanḍaiyar kuḻali. The zig-
zagging of mythologies and folk traditions between Neeli, the wicked demoness,
and the divine consort of Śiva is so “fuzzy” that it takes us back to the point raised
by Blackburn and Ramanujam (Blackburn and R amanujan 1986, 4–5; 14–15) as
to how categories such as “folk” and “classical,” “oral” and “textual,” even “secu-
lar” and “sacred” are rendered untenable because of the obvious “continuum”
which is, however, not linear but zigzag in its movement.

The earliest textual Jain version which draws the story line of Neelakēsi
from oral traditions is the Ratnakāranḍaka Sravakāchara by the Jain Acharya
Sāmantabhadra of the second century CE, dealing with Jain Grahastha dharma or
“duties of the householder.” Sāmantabhadra is said to have been one of the leading
lights of “Jīna Kānchi,” so called because Kānchīpuram was then under the sway of
Jainism. The text has an elaborate commentary by Bhattāraka Prabhāchandrāchārya
of the fourteenth century.

Another early version of the Neeli story is found in the Jain text Neelakēsi which
has an anonymous authorship but is roughly datable in terms of its time frame to
the sixth century CE. The other contemporaneous work in which Neeli is referred
to at some length is the Buddhist text Kunḍalakēsi. The author (unnamed) of

140 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

Neelakēsi claims that the entire plot was unfolded before him in a vision. It is sig-
nificant that the central women characters in both these texts would be treated as
anti-heroines in the Brahmanical canon. Kunḍalakēsi, who is said to have defended
Buddhist philosophical doctrines and spread her faith widely, was a prostitute.
Neelakēsi, who became her main rival and challenger, is said to have been Neeli
pēy, a cunning female demoness, before her conversion to Jainism and her emer-
gence as its votary. The first ontological confusion immediately arises out of the
apparent transformation of a spirit into a person and the question of whether she
exists in the spirit world or the material (“real”) world.

The Jain versions refer to Neeli as the daughter of a Jain merchant who was
married off by trickery to a Buddhist merchant named Sāgaradatta. When asked
to cook meat for a Buddhist guest (some Buddhists, unlike Jains, had become
meat eaters), Neeli responded by making a dish out of a leather slipper. This was
dangerously deviant behavior and Neeli’s husband and in-laws retaliated by falsely
accusing her of unchastity. Eventually the gods themselves came forth to proclaim
her pure and virtuous. A dēvata (deity) appeared to the king in a dream, inform-
ing him that the gates had been sealed through magical power and that only a
chaste woman of the city could open them again. The next morning the king
ordered all the women to assemble at the city gates and try one-by-one to open
them. All the women failed to do so. Neeli had not been called upon to take the
test because her in-laws had already branded her as unchaste. When finally Neeli
was called upon to try, her mere touch opened the door and Neeli was thus pro-
claimed as being virtuous and divine. It is noteworthy that in the medieval four-
teenth century commentary on Neelakēsi by Diwākara Vāmana Munivar, Neeli
is reverentially addressed as Mā daivam, literally “the great goddess.” This Neeli
is then described as having won great theological battles against the Buddhists,
especially at the great polemical debates held at Kampili.26 One of the interesting
aspects of this version of Neelakēsi is that this Neeli could be the prototype of any
chaste wife within the Brahmanical patriarchal structure. Incidentally, this text also
shows that, unlike the period of the Śilappadikāram when the heterodox faiths
presented a joint front against Brahmanical orthodoxy, by the sixth to seventh
centuries Buddhism and Jainism were each cutting into and destroying the sup-
port bases of one other.

The story of Neelakēsi as retold by its fourteenth-century commentators, both
Bhaṭṭāraka Prabhachandra Acharya and Diwākara Vāmana Munivar, gives rise to
another vexing issue. Is the social situation described by these commentators in
any way an authentic representation of the age of Acharya Sāmantabhadra, which
was the second century CE, or is it more reflective of the problematic of the medi-
eval commentators themselves? Some of the tensions between Brahmanism on
the one hand and Jainism and Buddhism on the other, as they existed in the post-
Sangam age right up to the Pallava period in the seventh century, is borne out
by multiple sources, including the Sanskrit play Maṭṭavilāsaprahasana by King
Mahēndravarman of the Pallava dynasty. It is therefore likely that these tensions

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 141

do actually reflect the concerns of Sāmantabhadra. However, the latter elements of
the story dealing with the Veḷḷāḷa community are suggestive of a medieval context
during which the landowning community of Veḷḷāḷas had gained both power and
prestige. The importance given to the Veḷḷāḷa community in both medieval com-
mentaries supports this assumption.

Popular versions of this myth conclude with the deification of Neeli and her
enshrinement as Isakki Amman in the Tirunelvēli and Kanyakumari districts as
well as the area in and around Pālayamkōttai, and as Kaḷiyamman in the Chin-
gleput district, especially Tiruvālangāḍu. The deification of deviant or dangerous
women (including murderous women) who can be said to constitute the socially
marginalized/ostracized “subaltern” women, is not a phenomenon that is uncom-
mon to South Indian culture.27 The jilted virgin (exemplified in the Kanyākumari
Amman), the murdered woman, and the murderous woman have all been regarded
with fear and awe leading to their worship as local deities, or Ellai Dēvata. The
worship of deviant women as Ellai Dēvata suggests very interesting possibilities.
“Ellai” in the Tamil language literally means “border line” but can be interpreted
to mean either village “limits” or liminalities of social, moral behavior and the
transformation potential of these deviant women. Valorizing and worshipping
deviant women can be one way of freezing them at the borders of an established
culture threatened by potential change.

At present, two significant representations of the Neeli tale are to be found
in the performance traditions: yakshagānam (Blackburn 1980 and 1988) and
villupāṭṭu (Neeli Yakshagānam, 1994). Yakshagānam (the “tamilization” of any
word is indicated by the addition of an “m” at the end of the word) broadly repre-
sents the folk musical theater in the Karnataka and Andhra regions. Like the teru
kootu of Tamil Nadu, it takes up for rendition popular stories from south Indian
myths and traditions including the Alli Katai and the Neeli Katai. According to
oral tradition, Lord Śiva sent his followers, called ganās, to learn music from the
sage Shukrāchāriyār, and this came to be known as yakshagānam. In Andhra the
local people call such music Jukkula Pāta. This genre of dance music was popular
in the Vijayanagar court. Kavi Nannayya wrote Karutachala Yakshagānam while
Allasani Peddanna codified the musical grammar of Yakshagānam. The genre of
musical story narrations known as villupāṭṭu is still widely prevalent in the Tamil
areas. The term “villu” refers to a huge bow which is the main musical instru-
ment along with the uḍukku, a percussion instrument used for dramatic effect by
the villupāṭṭu singers. The themes were closely associated with mythology (seeta
kalyāṇam), folk deities (aiyyan katai), or folk ballads (Nallattaṅgāḷ katai). The
villupāṭṭu “Neeli Katai” had a dual implication—it was the ballad of the deceit-
ful demoness Paḻayanūr Neeli and at the same time the story of the “folk” god-
dess Isakki Amman/Paḻayanūr Kāḷi. The “Neeli Katai” versions of both the
yakshagānam and villupāṭṭu constitute representations of the popular culture and
religious beliefs of the South Indians. Interestingly, most of these tales have cur-
rency among the tribal or lower-caste communities of Tamil Nadu. Issaki Amman
or Kāḷiyamman, who become symbols of the metamorphosis of Neeli, are folk

142 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

deities, worshipped by communities like the Paraiah, Pulaiya, Māla, and Maḍiga,28
which are low-caste or outcaste.

Āravalli and Sūravalli: The Sorceress
Queens, or the Ballad of the Seven Sisters

The ballad of Āravalli and Sūravalli 29 is set in the kingdom of Nellūru
Paṭṭinam, of which the title characters were the undisputed rulers. The ballad in
fact refers to seven sisters but the reins of control were in the hands of these two
women, who are described as sorcerers. Like the ballad of Alli, this ballad also feeds
back into the Mahābhārata legend. This time the chief protagonist is not Arjunā
but Bhīma. While the Pānḍavās ruling Indraprastha are perturbed over the militant
quality of these two women, who used both might and cunning combined with
sorcery to ruthlessly crush all opposition to them, Bhima offers to conquer them.
The first part of the ballad is about the ignoble defeat of Bhima at the hands of
these two women, who utterly humiliate him and send him back to his brothers.

In this context one can go beyond Blackburn’s arguments of a classical-folk con-
tinuum. The printed folklore versions of Āravalli-Sūravalli lend themselves to being
studied as counter-texts. Conceptually, the dominance of women appears to be a
nonexistent notion in mainstream epics but is brought in deliberately in oral lit-
erature, which is what makes ballads like Āravalli-Sūravalli seem more like counter-
texts because of the stark contrast to the patriarchal images in the Sanskrit epics.

The main plot of the story unfolds when the hapless Pānḍavās use the astrological
skills of Sahadev to formulate a master plan against the two cunning women. The
plan is to adopt their nephew Alli Rājan (also called Alli Muttu), the son of their
sister Sangavathi, for the specific purpose of taking up the challenge posed by the
sisters on behalf of the Pānḍavās. Neither Sangavathi nor Alli Muttu figure in the
mainstream texts of the Mahābhārata and are to be seen only in this Tamil ballad.

In the third part of the ballad, Alli Rāja, who is now the legal heir of the
Pānḍavās, goes to Nellūru Paṭṭinam. On the way, he defeats Ellai Kāḷi, the local
goddess who stands at the borders of the village and guards the villagers through
her awe-inspiring presence. Kāḷi is pleased with the earnestness of Alli Rāja and his
special mission. She therefore gives him sacred water (water sanctified by powerful
incantations) and other assets like a magical horse.

The major part of the epic comes to an end with the humiliating defeat of
the two cunning sorcerers Āravalli and Sūravalli. The defeat is not through actual
combat but in the defeat of Āravalli’s cock by Alli Rāja. Here the importance
of cockfights as status deciders is noteworthy. Cockfights become signifiers of a
power struggle involving loss of territories and political eclipse. Here I would like
to draw attention in particular to the celebrated essay by Clifford Geertz (Geertz
1973, 412–54).30 A significant departure from the Balinese tradition in this Tamil
story is the pro-active role played by the queens and their women in the bloody
cockfights, while women are conspicuous by their absence in the Balinese context.

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 143

The cunning queens of Nellūru Paṭṭinam had so far managed to poison or meddle
with their opponents’ cock to bring about their defeat. The victory of Alli Rāja’s
cock marks the end of this battle of wits in the arena of the cockfight. As a sign of
their submission the two queens offer their adopted daughter Palvarisai in mar-
riage to the victor.

The concluding part of this ballad is like the fifth act of a Shakespearian play. The
scenes are packed with dramatic incidents leading to the denouement. Alli Rāja
initially suspects that the daughter may have learned black magic from her moth-
ers but is eventually convinced of her goodness and innocence. The newly-wedded
pair make their way into the forest where the bride in her innocence follows the
instructions of her mothers and gives poisoned lemon juice31 to her husband after
first intoxicating his senses with the fragrance of a poisoned bouquet.

Palvarisai discovers the perfidy of her foster mother only when her bridegroom
lies dead. She curses her wicked mothers and the land of her birth with the stron-
gest invectives, including her curse seeking the destruction of Nellūru Paṭṭinam by
fire.32 Āravalli and Sūravalli welcome their widowed daughter triumphantly, seeking
to console her by promising remarriage (Āravalli Sūravalli Katai 1978, 80–81). It
is unusual to find a reference to widow remarriage in ballads which are largely patri-
archal in tone. This is held up in the text as a further indication of the devious path
taken by the two cunning queens.

The defeat of Āravalli and Sūravalli brings about the patriarchal taming not
only of these defiant queens and their unbridled energies (born probably out of
their celibate virginal power) but also of the tale itself, which seems to be strongly
rooted in a non-patriarchal Tamil society. The crowning achievement of patriarchy
is the inspired advice of Lord Krishna that Palvarisai, having become the wife of
Alli Rāja, should now bear the Sanskritic name Balambal, completely discarding
her original Tamil Dravidian identity!

Gods and mortals actively participate (as in the Greek plays) towards a final
solution of the human tangle. The play ends with the resurrection of Alli Rāja and
the burning of Nellūru Paṭṭinam. Not only Āravalli and Sūravalli, but all the seven
sisters are disfigured by having their noses cut off, and these are strung into a gar-
land and offered to Ellai Kāḷi.

The dramatized versions of Āravalli and Sūravalli, as well as its cinematic ver-
sions (in 1946 by C. V. Raman and in 1957 by Modern Studios), have followed
the pattern of unbridled female power eventually tamed by patriarchy. However,
the texts are rendered complex by the “excess” which flows through them, indica-
tive of non-patriarchal elements forming a fragmented sub-text. To give just one
instance, while the leading female protagonists are “tamed” by patriarchy, one of
the sisters escapes into Kerala and becomes the “fierce Bhagavati” (evocative of the
fearsome Goddess Durga or Kāḷi) who attracts worship embedded in fear.33

There is a constant tension in the many gujili texts and performance scripts of
the Ballad of the Seven Sisters between the female protagonists of the ballad and its
multiple renderings. Āravalli and Sūravalli, as well as their other sisters, were “cun-
ning queens” and “sorceresses” in the eyes of whom? The appropriation of these

144 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

characters by male scriptwriters and their strong negative representations create a
different problematic for the entire genre of women-oriented myths, re-forming
the myths as a part of a patriarchal agenda. The narrators of these ballads were all
male, and very often even the performers of these anti-heroines were male until
the nineteenth century when women began appearing on stage, subtly chang-
ing the mode of representation. Deconstructing the renderings of the Āravalli-
Sūravalli texts may probably present us with images not of cunning witches but
of women rulers with political acumen who refused to succumb to any kind of
taming, whether “patriarchal” or “political.”34

Alli and pavaLakkoḌi: from
amazonian rulers to submissive wives

Alli and Pavaḻakkoḍi were probably local cult figures and the prod-
ucts of a society that was non-patriarchal.35 These reflect the process by which
myths, born out of an early Tamil tradition that was Dravidian and matrilocal,
get tamed and are eventually absorbed into the dominant Sanskritic mythology of
the Mahābhārata. In the zigzag course of its transmission, the stories of Alli and
Pavaḻakkoḍi develop a finely textured life of their own.

The Alli myth in its various shifts and movements may point to a coming
together of two somewhat divergent traditions. Alli Arasāṇi Mālai, in terms of its
literary and cultural content, combines indigenous Tamil traditions, which can be
broadly categorized as Dravidian, and the Sanskritic (Upper-caste non-Brahmin
and/or Brahmanical) tradition. The latter makes its presence felt in Tamil culture
towards the late-Sangam period (Katai Sangam). This cultural encounter was
a long, drawn-out process. Rigid caste hierarchies were not indigenous to early
Tamil societies, which consisted of kuḍi, a generic term meaning “inhabitants.”
The kuḍi were economically stratified in terms of occupational differences, but
caste hierarchies were marked by a certain degree of fluidity.36 The Sangam poet
Auvaiyār, a low-born Virali (minstrel) of the Pānār caste, talks of her dining with
the king at his table. In his article on “Early Evidence for Caste in South India,”
Hart identifies the Pānār with Pulaiyar, a medieval “untouchable” caste (Hart
1987, 2–4) There are many such instances of social egalitarianism in ancient Tamil
society. However, caste itself is not extraneous to early Tamil society but is embed-
ded in Dravidian culture, as Hart has argued. What is therefore rendered “fuzzy”
is the notion of caste hierarchies and social distancing.

Alli is said to be the only child of a Pāṇdyan king who is not located in chrono-
logical time or identified by name. The location of the Alli myth in Madurai, the
capital of the Pāṇdyan kingdom, is once again interesting since the hagiographical
tradition, enshrined in the Periyapurāṇam, states that Madurai was ruled by the
three-breasted Meenakshi, who eventually went on to become the wife of Śiva.
Like the divine ruler Meenakshi, Alli too was trained in martial arts and went to a
gurukula (traditional school) to learn sacred texts as well as texts of governance.

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 145

She became the ruler on the death of her father. The whole land is described as
having been in terror of the Pāṇdyan queen Alli. The Pavaḻakkoḍi Mālai says:

If you take the name of Alli (Alli Arasāṇi Mālai, 52)
Even the bird will not sip water
If you take the name of Alli
The goblins (Gaṇās) will dance.
If you take the name of Alli
The decapitated head will chatter!

When Alli was ruling in Madurai, the much married Pānḍavā prince Arjunā sets
out with Krishnā, his friend, cousin, and spiritual guide, on a long pilgrimage.
Starting from Mathurā and Kāshi, the two pilgrims reach Madurai wearing the
garb of ascetics. Here an innkeeper acquaints them with the valor and beauty of
Alli. The man describes Alli’s victory over Neenmugan and her authoritarian rule
in Madurai, under which any slight lapse would cause heads to roll (Alli Nāṭakam
1967, 12). Arjunā’s sarcastic innuendoes at her masculinity suggest the imaging of
Alli as a “castrated male.” In Tamil, eunuchs are called Alli, perhaps drawing on
this folk legend. At this, the narrator treats him to a detailed description of Alli’s
stunning beauty and her many charms. Arjunā is told that since she cannot tolerate
the presence of any man, all her governmental functionaries, both high and low,
ranging from military commanders and ministers to carpenters and other petty
craftsmen, were women (Alli Arasāṇi Katai 1987, 31). Even today among Tamils
an all-female household is sarcastically referred to as “Alli Rājyam,” literally “the
administration run by Alli.”

The rest of the Alli ballad deals with the taming and domestication of Alli into
a virtuous and obedient wife to Arjunā. Arjunā enters the Pāṇḍyan kingdom in
the guise of an ascetic (sanyāsi), presumably to hide his well-known penchant for
beautiful women. A popular saying in the Tamil areas is “Arjunā sanyāsi,” meaning
a sanctimonious humbug! Arjunā tries to seduce Alli in various ways. He must,
however, be seen to preserve patriarchal norms, and marriage was and is con-
sidered a most important social norm. Thus the texts that retold and reworked
the Alli myth emphasized the fact that Arjunā’s seduction of Alli was followed by
marriage. Arjunā cheats the man-hating Alli by penetrating her bedroom in the
form of a beautiful snake given to her by Krishnā in disguise. Alli in her innocence
plays with the snake, which eventually hypnotizes her. The imaging of Arjunā as
the seductive and aggressive male snake indicates the use of very powerful sexual
imagery. A graphic description in the Alli Katai says that the love play of Arjunā
drained Alli of all her resistance, making her feel drugged with passion (Alli Katai,
verses 1035 to 1940). Thus, Arjunā seduces Alli without her knowledge or con-
sent. The process of Alli being tamed by a patriarchal hero is thus set into motion
with the sexual conquest of Alli resulting in the loss of her virginity, which was
believed to be the source of her power. Arjunā achieves the ultimate “triumph”
over Alli when he secretly ties the Tāli, the yellow thread symbolizing a woman’s
marital status in South Indian tradition, around Alli’s neck and she conceives the

146 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

same night. Alli is furious and outraged and wants to murder Arjunā. However,
at this point she is made to realize by her female companions that she is now a
married woman, and as a would-be mother she has no option but to submit to
the will of Arjunā.

The ballad of Pavaḻakkoḍi (Pavaḻakkoḍi Mālai 1975) follows virtually the same
trajectory as the story of Alli. The story of Pavaḻakkoḍi is also a multilayered text
with versions ranging from the Pavaḻakkoḍi Mālai of Pugaḻendi Pulavar, an oral
ballad, to the Pavaḻakkoḍi Nāṭakam or performance texts of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Pavaḻakkoḍi was another female ruler who became the vic-
tim of Arjunā’s desire. The ballad begins with Alli’s son Pulandaran crying for a
toy chariot made of coral. Neither queen Alli nor her son Pulandaran have been
visited by Arjunā since the birth of the boy five years earlier. The all-women team
of ministers advise Alli that coral could be obtained only from the dense coral
forests located at a distance of eight hundred yojanas (one yojana being roughly
fourteen kilometers, making the distance approximately 11,520 kilometers) from
Madurai. They tell Alli that she must swallow her pride and request help from her
husband Arjunā, since he was the only person capable of achieving this task. A
furious Alli tells them:

A loveless betrayer, a parama canḍālan, (Pavaḻakkoḍi Nāṭakam)
A brashṭa who cheats women
Betraying truth, dealing in lies,
On seeing that Canḍāla, I shall behead him37

Love for her son makes Alli suppress her resentment. She writes a false let-
ter to Yudhishṭira at Indraprastha seeking Arjunā’s presence in Madurai because
Pulandiran is on his death bed. Arjunā is enjoying the company of Subhadrā,
Krishna’s sister and one of his many wives, when the news reaches him.

Arjunā enters Madurai with trepidation, fearful of Alli’s righteous fury. The
shamefaced Arjunā is abused by Alli and threatened with dire consequences if he
does not get Pulandiran a coral cart within eight days.

Pavaḻakkoḍi, like Alli, is not conceived naturally but found on a coral creeper
by the childless royal couple of the Cheramboor area. Pugaḻendi Pulavar says that
she has been dressed and brought up as a boy, and that most people did not know
their future ruler was a woman. Spurning marriage, Pavaḻakkoḍi had been govern-
ing her kingdom for sixteen years.

Arjunā sets out in search of coral and comes upon the princess Pavaḻakkoḍi,
literally the coral creeper, in the Cherambūr area. As usual, Krishnā joins him to
aid and abet him in sexual conquests. Arjunā, who had seduced Alli as a snake,
now enters the bedroom of Pavaḻakkoḍi as a swan and makes a conquest of
her. Pavaḻakkoḍi is humiliated and angry at the loss of her virginity. She taunts
him by asking him “who else he has seduced in like manner.” Arjunā’s brazen
response is to list the names of those women who he had initially raped and
then married:

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 147

Hear then, my beauty, if you think (Pavaḻakkoḍi Mālai, 51)
yourself the only one so seduced
Many are the women I have violated
Draupadi born from fire
Minnoḷi born from the clouds
Nāga princess Ulupi conceived by a snake
Subhadra sister of Krishnā and
the able ruler Alli
All I have raped and more!38

Following her seduction and rape when Pavaḻakkoḍi laments her fate, Arjunā con-
soles her by saying that she will be in the company of Subhadrā, the sister of Lord
Krishnā, Draupadi, and Alli, the Pānḍyan queen. As with the ballad of Alli, the
story of Pavaḻakkoḍi ends with her taming by Arjunā into a submissive wife.

When Arjunā fails to return to Madurai even after sixteen days in the land of
Pavaḻakkoḍi, Alli declares war in order to hunt him down and kill him. She tells
the court, “Let the world know that Alli Nayaki hated her husband and let other
women draw inspiration from me and gain fame” (Pavaḻakkoḍi Nāṭakam, 32).
Arjunā feigns death in order to escape the wrath of Alli and the play ends when Alli
gives away all her parisam (matrilineal) lands to Krishnā (in the guise of a physi-
cian) for bringing Arjunā back to life.

It is noteworthy that the notion of conquest—of both woman and land—is built
into all these tales, cutting across multiple renditions. By seducing and marrying
the female rulers, Alli and Pavaḻakkoḍi, the Pānḍavā prince Arjunā also annexes
virgin territory.

The performances of Alli and Pavaḻakkoḍi in what is termed Company Drama or
teru kootu is a fascinating story of women’s inclusion and exclusion, both offstage
and onstage. In the performances of the Śankaradās Svāmigaḷ troupe, stree-part
(literally “women’s part”) roles were enacted mostly by male actors. An interesting
aspect of early performances of Alli is that the role was initially performed by men
called stree-part, such as “Alli” Paramesvara Iyer. Thus stree-part in conventional
usage came to refer exclusively to men playing women’s roles. This happened
sometimes even with “soft” female roles, meaning the portrayal of women who
are not characterized by “masculinity” like Alli Rāṇi but are very feminine in their
delineation. For instance, S. G. Kiṭṭappa, who went on to become a celebrated
male actor, played the female role of Ānḍaḷ in the play Sri Ānḍaḷ Tirumaṇam
(Ānḍaḷ’s wedding) in 1928. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century,
the softer female/feminine roles were beginning to be performed by women them-
selves. Names like Parsi Miss. P. Vaḍivāmbāḷ (Vaḷḷi in the play Vaḷḷi Tirumaṇam),
T. M. Kamalavēni (Seizer 2007, 88–89), and a decade later K. P. Sundarāmbāḷ,
begin to appear in drama notices.39 From the mid–1930s women were beginning
to dare playing roles like Alli Rāṇi. In her book, Susan Seizer has discussed a drama
notice of Pavaḻakkoḍi in 1936 where K. P. Jānaki plays the role of Alli Rāṇi, and
Rathināmbāḷ acts as Princess Pavaḻakkoḍi (Seizer 2007, 98). There are occasional

148 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

cases of women appearing in male roles, such as K. B. Sundarāmbāḷ in the lead
role of Nandanār in the film Nandanār in 1935, or M. S. Subbalakshmi as Nārada
in the film Sāvitri in 1941. When women began to act on a regular basis in cinema
around the 1930s, hardly any of them would accept the role of Alli because of its
negative image in society, and the first cinematic Alli was an Anglo-Indian actress.
Subsequently, women began to perceive the role as a challenge and agreed to per-
form it. One of the earliest such performances was by S. D. Subbulakshmi in 1934
in Pavaḻakkoḍi. Susan Seizer’s study of special drama artists has poignant accounts
of the social marginalization of these early actresses. Her documentation rein-
forces the notions of stigma attached to women on stage, a theme that has been
so eloquently written about in the context of Bengali stage actresses like Binōdini
Dāsi (Bhattacharya 1998; Banerjee 2000).

Another facet to these dramatic performances is the swing in the characteriza-
tion of Alli from the angry virago to the romantic virgin. In early twentieth-cen-
tury Chennai, B. Ratna Nayakar and Sons brought out a performance text of Alli
called Alli Nāṭakam which began to be staged soon after publication. This ver-
sion continued to be printed even in the 1960s (Tirumagal Press, 1967). Follow-
ing Pugaḻēndi Pulavar, the sixteenth-century author of Alli Arasāṇi Mālai, all
later versions hold up the submission of the militant Alli to Arjunā as a moral les-
son which all right-thinking women should draw upon—that a woman’s ultimate
destiny is fulfilled only as a wife and a mother. It was also imperative for the suc-
cess of stage performances that Alli’s personality be softened for the story line to
develop a romantic interest which, while providing occasions for song and dance
sequences, would attract the largely (perhaps entirely) male audience. The induc-
tion of romance by populist scriptwriters then altered the stage script. To give just
one example, the Alli of Kappinipadi Piḷḷai, a scriptwriter, in the eighteenth-cen-
tury stage version is a tender-hearted woman who runs to the aid of Arjunā when
he swoons upon seeing her in the forests of Madurai. The verse goes:

On seeing Alli, Vijayan, that most handsome of men,
Vijayan of the famed bow;
falls prostrate like a coconut tree cut at its roots...
Māyan (Krishnā) gathered him into his arms while Alli
ran up in haste and said “blow the breath of dry ginger upon his face.”

(Alli Katai, 25)

With the coming of the cinema, as many cinematic versions of Alli and Pavaḻakkoḍi
appeared as there were films made on chaste heroines like Kaṇṇagi. Alli Arjunā in
1935, Alli Vijayam in 1942 and Alli Rāṇi with S. Varalakshmi in the lead role are
some of the commercially successful cinematic versions of the Alli story. Similarly,
the production of Pavaḻakkoḍi in 1934 and again in 1949 (the latter version with
T. R. Rajakumari in the lead), shows that these ballads held a continued fascination
for the Tamil audience. The film Mandirikumāri, scripted by M. Karuṇānidhi,40 is
about the physical and moral conquest of Pavaḻakkoḍi by Arjunā. Men, who largely
comprised the theater audience, enjoyed the performances overtly, while women

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 149

covertly read the Gujili versions until such time as women began to perform (by
the late 1930s) and interpret these roles in their own fashion. Women also began
to frequent the theater, thereby changing the composition of the audience.

Yet this fascination of women for daring and deviant females apparently did
not extend to their acceptance in orthodox homes. Neelāmbikai Ammaiyār, the
celebrated daughter of Marai Malai Aḍigaḻ and the founder of the anti-British,
anti-Congress movement Tani Tamiḻ Iyakkam, writes in her essay Muppeṇmaṇigaḷ
Varalāru (The Life of Three Women):

Women should not be permitted to read texts like Alli Arasāṇikkovai

Pavaḻakkoḍi Mālai, Ēṇi Ēṭram, and so on, which may lead them into bad ways

(author’s emphasis mine). They do not only read such texts day and night but

also read books (Brahmanical Sanskrit texts) like Kaivalya Navaneetam which

are false doctrines. (Neelāmbikai 1946, 26–27)

Neelāmbikai Ammaiyār’s statement indicates, on the one hand, the patriarchal
responses to the Alli myth which was regarded as corrupting and subversive. At the
same time it shows that the notion of women’s freedom and the urge to carve out
one’s own spaces independent of the ubiquitous patriarchal male did exercise the
imagination of girls/women who showed a penchant for the Alli ballads. Deviant
behavior was seen to be encouraged by the reading of the multiple versions of the
printed folklore of Alli Rāṇi or by watching its performances.

An open-ended conclusion

This article has endeavored to use folkloristics as the mode to trace the
process by which the indigenous imaging of women by women or by various male
agencies in Tamil folklore have engaged with a society that appears to be predomi-
nantly patriarchal. One of the foci of this study has been to highlight the processes
of mutations in the tales/myths center-staging Tamil women.

This article has also tried to engage with male-female responses to these women-
oriented stories within performance traditions. On the one hand, ballads like that
of Alli, Neeli, and Āravalli-Sūravalli, at the social level, represent reprehensible
social and moral behavior but, on the other hand, continue to excite the imagina-
tion of the Tamils cutting across gender lines, as proved by the popularity of these
themes in “public” theater and Tamil cinema.

A question that arises repeatedly in looking at women-oriented folklore is the
extent to which they actually represent a “feminist” gaze. This suspicion is borne
out by reexamining these texts, many of them deliberately representing women
as either powerless, suffering “subjects” or as cunning witches. To quote Barbara
A. Babcock in her review of Jordon and K alcik (1985), “an important distinc-
tion should have been made between the folklore about women, which, quite sig-
nificantly, may or may not be authored by women, and women’s folklore, that is
verbal or nonverbal genres used or created by women” (Babcock 1986, 734–35).

150 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

She is making the obvious point that folklore about women can also be contained
within the patriarchal register.

A. K. Ramanujan has raised the question of women’s agency in the context of
women-oriented Tamil tales (Dharwadker 1999, 429–47). He begins with the
interesting point that even when men narrate these tales, the original narrator
of the tale would have been a woman (Dharwadker 1999, 429). Ramanujan
points out that the “stories are told performatively” (Dharwadker 1999, 438),
although portrayals of characters and performances themselves vary a great deal in
narrations, texts, and performances through time and space.

In the woman’s tale singled out by Ramanujan, as well as in the Alli story, the
snake lover appears as a powerful motif. The penetration of the sensuous snake
into the bedroom of the virgin and her seduction and eventual conquest lends
itself to the printed text, (it being much more vexatious to introduce a sensuous
snake on stage), suggesting a male readership. The notion of merit and demerit,
what the printed folklore calls phala-sruti (the fruits of hearing and narrating), is
very much a part of these stories. These are usually didactic in tone and constitute
moral lessons for women. The phala-sruti neatly draws a “woman’s tale,” which
may be deviant in tone, back into the folds of patriarchy. Does this indicate that
these tales in some of their more visible/popular versions were the products of
male fantasy?

I have at the same time endeavored to show that the tales of deviant women
like Alli definitely had a female readership, and women constituted a major sec-
tion of the audience when these stories found a niche in popular cinema from
the middle of the twentieth century. This article has at various points raised the
question of women’s agency in the conception, creation, or performance of these
women-oriented ballads. This issue has come up in Seizer’s recent book on Tamil
performance traditions (Seizer 2007) by discussing women stage actresses from
the 1930s till the present.

By the 1950s and 1960s, along with the stiff competition among actresses to
emote in films like Kaṇṇagi, every popular heroine was vying for the role of
the valorous female—T. R. Rajakumari (Pavaḻakkoḍi) and Savitri Ganesan (Rāṇi
Cengamalam), to name only two. Phoenix-like ballads such as Alli Katai continue
to surface in the culture, especially in the cinematic matrix of the Tamils, the most
recent example being Alli Arjuna with Richa Pallod in the lead role in 2001. This
is an important indicator of their continuous validation in Tamil society in which
there is an almost symbiotic link between Tamil cinema and everyday lives.

Folklore being multi-textured, (whether the tales appear as oral renditions, per-
formances, or popular printed texts) does not provide simple answers to this com-
plex methodological question of intent and agency. What is clear, however, is that
these texts or performances could change their gender contours depending on the
primary agency behind them. Women performers could and did bring to these
stories a deviant/defiant spirit that undercut the patriarchal agenda and appealed
to certain constituencies of women.

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 151

I would like to conclude with the observation that, in the context of Tamil folk-
lore, almost every kind of Western theoretical category, while serving as a useful
starting point, breaks down when subjected to the nuances of Tamil culture. No
linear methodology can be employed in understanding the shifts and mutations
of these women-centered oral traditions. I therefore end this article with a quot-
able quote from Henry H. Stahl’s classic work, The Traditional Romanian Village
Communities:

The only method to use in order to understand this apparently chaotic muddle

of social phenomena, which are mixed from century to century and from region

to region, is to proceed not only backwards or in reverse but also forwards, in

chronological order, zigzagging from time to time, from century through cen-

tury, as much forward as backward. (Stahl 1980, 9)

Notes

* I wish to thank S. Karmegham, George Hart, Susan Vishwanathan, Kumkum Roy, and
Sadhana Naithani for their comments on this article, and my husband C. P. Krishnan for
his fine-tuning of the text. Some of my research was carried out in the folklore library of St.
Joseph’s College at Palayankottai in Tamil Nadu. I am grateful to Professor Lourdu for shar-
ing with me his rich folklore material as well as his methodological insights in the context of
my work in November and December 2007. With his sudden death in 2008, Tamil folklore
studies has lost a great scholar.

1. In the transliteration of Tamil words this article follows the international convention of
the Library of Congress. Where feasible, I have followed the recognizable Anglicized form.
All translations from Tamil are mine unless otherwise stated.

2. Venkatachalapathy 1994. The thesis has an interesting section on Gujili literature.
3. Moor Market still exists and I would like to draw the attention of this journal’s readers to
a delightful piece posted on the following website: http://baleshlakshminarayanan.wordpress
.com on 10 June 2008 titled “Reading Ain’t that Costly in Chennai” (Accessed 3 February
2010).
4. On this point I am grateful to Venkatachalapathy for his email communication on 15
July 2009.
5. The chakram was currency that was legal tender only in the old Travancore State. In the
early twentieth century the exchange rate was twenty-eight chakrams to the British rupee.
As late as the 1970s the price of a book was still one rupee or seventy-five paise, that is three
quarters of a rupee. This will give an idea of the cheap price of these publications.
6. Interesting definitions of the villupāṭṭu tradition and its dramatically changing themes,
from mythologies to an AIDS campaign, were presented at a workshop hosted jointly by the
National Folklore Support Centre and Ēkalaivan Villupāṭṭu Centre at Chennai, 21–25 Novem-
ber 2005.
7. Blackburn 1980 and 1988. A useful overview essay is Blackburn 1981. The more
recent work is Blackburn et al., 1989.
8. An interesting article that attempts precisely this is de Bruin 2001.
9. Tolkāppiyam of Tolkāppiyar. The text has many commentaries, notably by Iḷampūranār
of the Sangam period, and Daivacilaiyār and Naccinārkiniyār in the medieval period. I have
here followed the text and translation provided by E. S. Varadaraja Iyer, Tolkāppiyam:

152 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

Poruladikāram, 1948. The lengthy section on kaṟpiyal along with poruḷiyal is on pages 230
to 424.

10. Puranānūru: 198, see George L. Hart 1975, 96. This discussion on kaṟpu draws heav-
ily from the sections on kaṟpu in this book as well as on conversations with George Hart on
this issue. I am grateful to him for sharing this.

11. Tirukkuṟaḷ of Tiruvaḷḷuvar, chapter 6, stanza 54, V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar 1994, 13.
12. Śilappadikāram, ed. Dikshitar (1939) XX: 34–44. See Śilappadikāram: Moolamum
Uraiyum, ed. Swaminatha Iyer (2007).
13. Śilappadikāram, ed. Dikshitar (1939) XX: 34–44. See Śilappadikāram: Moolamum
Uraiyum, ed. Swaminatha Iyer (2007). The translation of the canto is by Dikshitar (1939),
247­–48.
14. There are other interesting versions of the story of Kaṇṇagi titled as Kōvalan Katai
(1972), written with the focus on Kōvalan, the ill-fated husband of Kaṇṇagi. Nazimuddin
provides an anthropological perspective in his Kōvalan Caritram (1992).
15. For the Sri Lankan versions of the Kaṇṇagi legend see Kanakaratnam 1984.
16. Kaṇṇagi in Śilappadikāram 21, 40–57, translation by Hart 1975, 105–106. A discus-
sion on historicizing Kaṇṇagi can be found in R amaswamy 2007 in the section “Chastity as
Female Spiritual Power,” 49–52.
17. Puranānūru, 1963, 369. Two other verses from the text also refer to Kaṇṇagi on pages
144–45.
18. See the website http://forumhub.mayyam.com. The passage was written by Pad-
manabha on 11 February 2007 (accessed 19 October 2008).
19. Recently, Nallataṅgāḷ was remembered by the Tamil community by brothers giv-
ing green saris on the day of her supposed death anniversary. Why green? This was perhaps
because green symbolizes the renewal of life. The people I interviewed in the course of my
fieldwork in 1997 were unable to give reasons for their choice of month and date for com-
memorating the event.
20. This honorific “Pēyar” is unusual since it literally means “demoness” but was being
used as early as the eighth century CE by Saivite saints like Sundarar and others to connote
the extreme renunciation of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār. Sculptural representations on many ancient
temple walls of a demonic figure beating time with cymbals to the cosmic dance of Śiva rein-
forces her nomenclature as “Kāraikkāl Pēyar.”
21. See the Tamil essay by Hameed, which attempts a lengthy comparison of the behavior
of the two wronged wives, Kaṇṇagi and Neelakēsi (1968).
22. Balakrishnan et. al. provided the English rendering of the Neeli Katai (1996) under
the title A Tale of Nemesis. Balakrishnan relates his field visit to the site of Tiruvaḷangadu con-
nected with Neeli and states that the local people, especially women, still believe the area to
be haunted by Neeli.
23. The term refers to folk deities placed on the borders of villages for the purpose of pre-
venting bad elements, including marauders or diseases from entering the village. These Ellai
Dēvatas (devatai is the feminine form) can still be seen in interior Tamil Nadu.
24. The story of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār is to be found in the Periyapurānam of Chekkiḻar.
25. For Norman Cutler’s translation see R amaswamy 2007, 132.
26. Some versions of the story of Neelakēsi, including the above version, are to be found
in R amaswamy 2007, 97–98.
27. The phenomenon of deviant women emerging as village goddesses was analyzed for
the first time by Whitehead 1921, 21, 52–53, and 117–18.
28. Under its policy of affirmative action in the cause of social justice, the Indian Gov-

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 153

ernment has defined these communities as “scheduled castes.” These are groups of castes
and tribes who were considered “backward” socially and economically so that they could be
granted special concessions and privileges with the Indian democratic constitution.

29. In this article I have followed the Periya Eḻuttu printed version provided in Āravalli
Sūravalli Katai said to have been composed by Pugaḻēndi Pulavar in 1973.

30. Following Geertz’s study, other scholars have looked at the significance of cockfights
in traditional cultures and politics. Cockfights in the context of the regime of the Philippine
dictator Marcos and his overthrow in the subsequent electoral battle is discussed in a recent
publication in Tamil (Britto 1999, 220).

31. Lemons are usually used by the performers of black magic to contain their incantations
in the fruit. Sweet lime is therefore perceived in traditional Indian society both as a source
of bewitching and at the same time used as an antidote to black magic. It is not uncommon
to find a garland of margossa (neem) leaves interspersed with sweet limes, hanging on the
threshold of traditional South Indian homes.

32. Palvarisai’s imprecations can be read in Āravalli Sūravalli Katai 1978, 78–79, 81.
33. Āravalli Sūravalli Katai 1978, 97–98. The connection between dangerous sexuality
and controlled “female power” is discussed in Hart 1999, 233.
34. The story of the seven sisters as the legend of Āravalli and Sūravalli has been subject to
analysis as performance text by Dhananjayan 1999.
35. A detailed contextualization of Alli within the cultural-scape of the Tamils has been
made in R amaswamy 2002, 72–74.
36. The changing status of women in Tamil society with the growth of Brahmanisation
and a transforming economic order is discussed in R amaswamy 1997, 223–45.
37. The term “Canḍāla” refers to the untouchable castes like professional castes involved
with death rituals. Parama Canḍāla means the most accursed of the untouchable castes.
Brashta refers to one who has deviated from the norms and duties of his caste, hence dharma
brashta. The term is being used here by Alli as the worst form of pejorative for Arjunā.
38. The word used in the text repeatedly is kaṟpaḻitta, which translates most aptly as “rape.”
The version I have followed is in Pavaḻakkoḍi Mālai 1975, 51.
39. Valuable input on the participation of women on stage is provided by Seizer 2007.
40. Karuṇānidhi is presently in his third term as chief minister of Tamil Nadu.

R eferences

Filmography
Kannagi (1942), dir. R. S. Mani. Jupiter Pictures.
Nallatangal (1935), dir. P. V. Rao, with K. R. Kanthimati Bai. Angel Films.
Nallatangal (1935), dir. Padmanabhan, with Ratna Bai. Pioneer Films.

Tamil: Primary Sources
Note: Katai means “story” while Natakam means “play.” The word Mālai is usually used for
poetry although in these texts even katai is in poetic form. Most of these texts do not carry
an author’s name.

Alli Nāṭakam. Chennai: R. G. Pati and Company, 1967.
Alli Nāṭakam. Chennai: Tirumagal Press, 1967.
Ālli Arasāṇi Mālai. Pugaḷendi Pulavar, Chennai: R. G. Pati and Company, 1972.

154 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

Ālli Arasāṇi Katai. Ed. L. N. Tamizhvanan. Chennai: Manimekalai Press, 1987.
Alli Katai. Ed. Dr. E. Sundaramurthy. Chennai: Madras University, 1989.
Āravalli Sūravalli Katai. Chennai: R. G. Pati and Company, 1978.
Duryodhanan Thunbapatta Eni Etra Natakam. Chennai: B. Ratna Nayakar and

Sons, 1971.
Kōvalan Katai. Chennai: R. G. Pati and Company, 1972.
Nallattaṅgāḷ Katai. China Bazar, Chennai: Sri Magal Company, 1973.
Neelakēsi. Ed. Samaya Diwakara Vamana Munivar and A. Chakravarty. Tanjavur:

Tamil University Publications, 1984.
Neelakēsi. Ed. P. V. Somasundaranar Tirunelveli: Saiva Siddhanta Kazhagam

Publications, 1973.
Neeli Katai. Trans. by G. S. Balakrishnan, ed. Shu Hikosaka, G. John Samuel,

and P. Subramaniam as The Tale of Nemesis. Chennai: Institute of Asian
Studies, 1996.
Neeli Katai. Tamizh Villu Padalgal. Ed. T. C. Gomati Nayagam. Chennai:
International Institute of Tamil Studies, 1979.
Neeli Katha: Tekkanpattu (in Malayalam). Musical traditions compiled by J. Pad-
makumary. Tiruvananthapuram: State Institute of Languages at Nalanda,
1994.
Neeli Yakshagānam. Ed. P. Subramaniam. Chennai: Institute of Asian
Studies, 1994.
Pavaḻakkoḍi Nāṭakam. Chennai: B. Ratna Nayakar and Sons, 1963.
Pavaḻakkoḍi Mālai. Chennai: R. G. Pati and Company, 1975.
Periyapuranam. Chekkiḻar, Chennai: Saiva Siddhanta Mahasamajam, 1950.
Puranānūru. Ed. U. V. Swaminathayyar. Madras: Kapir Achukootam, 1963.
Silappadikaram. Ed. V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, with an introduction by Jules
Bloch. Madras: Published by Humphrey Milford for Oxford University
Press, Indian Branch, 1939.
Śilappadikāram: Moolamum Uraiyum. Commentary by U. V. Swaminatha Iyer.
Chennai: U. V. Swaminatha Iyer Foundation, 2001. (orig. published 1892)
Tirukkural of Tiruvalluvar. Ed. and trans. by V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar. Chen-
nai: The Adayar Library and Research Centre, 1994.
Tolkāppiyam: Poruladikaram. Ed. E. S. Varadaraja Iyer, 2 vols. Annamalainagar:
Annamalai University, 1948.

Tamil References: Secondary Sources

Britto, Vincent
1999 Maatru Kalacharam [The changing face of culture]. In Panpattu Verka-
lai Tedi [Roots of Tamil Culture: Hermeneutics], ed. G. Stephen, 219–28.
Palayankottai, Tirunelveli: Folklore Resources and Research Centre.

Dhananjayan, A.
1999 Ezhu Kannimar Vazhipatttil Puranamum Chadangum (Puranic content
and ritual content in the worship of the seven sisters). In Panpattu Verka-
lai Tedi [Roots of Tamil culture: Hermeneutics], 105–114. Palayankottai,
Tirunelveli: Folklore Resources and Research Centre.

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 155

Gomatinayakam, T. C.
1979 Tamizh Villu Padalgal. Chennai: International Institute of Tamil Studies.

Hameed, K. P. S.
1968 Pazhayanur Neeliyum Kannagiyum. Tamarai 9, 10: 26–34.

Kanakaratnam, R. V.
1984 Izha Nattil Kannagi Vazhipadu. Journal of Tamil Studies, 198: 99–127.

Lourdu, S. D.
1988 Nattar Valakkarukal. Madras: Manikkavachagar Padippagam.
2000 Nattar Vazhakkatriyal: Sila Adippadaigal. Palayankottai: Folklore
Resources and Research Centre, St. Zaviers College.

Nallaperumal, A. N.
1987 Tamizhil Kathaippadal. Chennai: International Institute of Tamil Studies.

Nazimuddin, B.
1992 Kōvalan Caritram. Sivagangai: Annam Private Limited.

Neelāmbikai, Ammāiyar
1946 Muppeṇmaṇigaḷ Varalāru. Tirunelveli: Saiva Siddhanta Kazhagam
Publications.

R amachandran, N.
2002 Tuḍiyāna Sāmigaḷ: Villupattum Samuga Chikkalgalum. Chennai: Makkal
Veliyeedu.

Venkatachalapathy, A. R.
2004 Muchchandi Ilakkiyam. Chennai: Kalachchuvadu Publications.

References in English

Arunachalam, M.
1976 Peeps into Tamil Literature: Ballad Poetry. Tanjavur: Gandhi Vidyalayam.
Tiruchitrambalam Press.

Babcock, Barbara A.
1986 Review of Jordon and Kalcik. American Anthropologist, 88: 734–35.

Banerjee, Sumanta
2000 Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal. Calcutta:
Seagull Books.

Bhattacharya, Rimli, ed. and trans.
1998 Binodini Dasi: My Story and My Life as an Actress. New Delhi: Kali for
Women.

Blackburn, Stuart
1980 Performance as Paradigm: The Tamil Bow Song Tradition. Philadelphia:
University Microfilms International, USA.
1981 Indian performance traditions. In Pattanayak and Claus, 38–55.
1988 Singing of Birth and Death: Texts in Performance. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.

Blackburn, Stuart H., and A. K. R amanujan
1986 Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India. Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.

156 | Asian Ethnology 69/1 • 2010

Blackburn Stuart H., Peter J. Claus, Joyce B. Fluceckiger, and
Susan S. Wadley, eds.

1989 Oral Epics in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
de Bruin, Hanne M.

2001 The history of the rural natakam or drama in north Tamil Nadu. Seagull
Theatre Quarterly (September): 56–74.

Dharwadker, Vinay
1999 The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press.

Geertz, Clifford
1973 Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight. In The Interpretation of Cul-
tures, 412–54. New York: Basic Books.

Hart, George L
1975 The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and Sanskrit Counterparts.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
1987 Early evidence for caste in South India: Dimensions of social life. In Essays
in Honour of David B. Mandelbaum. ed. P. Hockings, 1–38. Berlin: Mou-
ton, Gruyter.
1999 Women and the sacred in ancient Tamil Nadu. In Women in Early Indian
Societies, ed. Roy Kumkum, 229–54. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers.
(originally published in the Journal of Asian Studies [1973] no.32: 233–50)

Jordon, Rosan A, and Susan J. Kalcik
1985 Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia, American Folklore Society.

Pattanayak, D. P., and Peter J. Claus, ed.
1981 Indian Folklore: Report of Discussions from the Indo-American Seminar on
Indian Folklore. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages.

R amanujan, A. K.
1999 Towards a counter-system: Women’s tales. In the Collected Essays of
A.K.Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker, 429–47. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press. (First published in 1991 in A. Appadurai, F. Korom, and
M. Mills, eds., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press)

R amaswamy, Vijaya
1994 Women and the domestic in Tamil folk songs. Man in India, 74 (1): 21–37.
1997 The Kudi in early Tamilaham and the Tamil women from tribe to caste. In
From Tribe to Caste, ed. Dev Nathan, 223–45. Shimla: The Indian Institute
of Advanced Study.
2002 The taming of Alli. Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal 27: 71–80.
2007 Walking Naked: Women, Society, Spirituality in South India. Shimla: Indian
Institute of Advanced Study. (First edition 1997)

Seizer, Susan
2007 Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in
South India. Calcutta: Seagull Books.

Singh, K. S., ed.
1993 The Mahabharata in the Tribal and Folk Traditions of India. Shimla: The
Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

ramaswamy: women in tamil oral traditions | 157

Stahl, Henry H.
1980 The Traditional Romanian Village Communities: The Transition From The
Communal To The Capitalist Mode Of Production In The Danube Region.
Trans. Daniel Chirot and Holley Coulter Chirot. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Trawick, Margaret
1990 Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.

Vanamamalai, N.
1969 Studies in Tamil Folk Literature. Chennai: New Century Book House Pvt.
Ltd.
1981 Interpretations of Tamil Folk Creations. Tiruvananthapuram: Dravidian Lin-
guistics Association.

Venkatachalapathy, A. R.
1994 A Social History of Tamil Book Publishing circa 1850–1938. Doctoral thesis,
Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru
University.

Venkatesha, M. N.
2005 Reflecting Folklore: Group Identities, Habitats, Dynamics of Performance.
Bangalore: K. S. Muddappa Smaraka Trust, Krishnapuradoddi.

Whitehead, Henry
1921 The Village Gods of South India. Calcutta: Association Press.